Lady Liberty Held Hostage

Published: April 7, 2004

The Statue of Liberty has always had a special place in American hearts, and when private donors were asked to pitch in to help make sure it was reopened after 9/11, the money poured in. While the donors should be celebrated for their generosity, this sort of basic caretaking at a national monument should have been done by the government. The statue's reopening has turned into an embarrassment for the Interior Department, and the most troubling aspect is what it says about the chronic underfinancing of the national park system.

Like other vulnerable landmarks, the statue was shut down after the terrorist attacks. The National Park Service then spent $19 million on security-related projects, which allowed the public to return to Ellis Island and Liberty Island by the end of 2001. But rather than do the work needed to reopen the statue itself, it turned the task of making the necessary safety improvements over to the Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation. The base will be reopened in August once the fixes are made.

The foundation, created to raise money for the statue's centennial in 1986, has a $30 million endowment. Critics wonder why it didn't tap that money to make the improvements instead of exploiting the project to begin a fund-raising campaign. But the bigger question is why the government dallied and why it turned to the foundation for a job that was part of its basic responsibilities.

The answers are not reassuring. Congress and the executive branch have been nickle-and-diming the parks for years, creating a $5 billion maintenance backlog that President Bush, despite stirring campaign promises, has hardly dented. The operating budget is also starved. The net result has been an emerging codependence between the Park Service and the private foundations formed to help the parks, with the foundations doing more and more essential work as public financing slips behind.

These foundations were designed to support extra services, not the critical missions that lie at the heart of the Park Service's responsibility. And if one were drawing up a list of such critical missions, one would surely include the reopening of the Statute of Liberty among them.